Premiere Pro Tutorial Part 60: Getting Slow-Motion Clips To Play Well

In the last tutorial, we talked about 4-point edits and how to use this to create slow-motion clips. However, there is a gotcha here … while speeding up a clip will result in Premiere Pro dropping frames, to slow a clip down means it must create new frames to fill the space – and it’s the options for creating these additional frames that we’re looking at here in this lesson.

Firstly, if you look at the clip the FX Badge has changed color to yellow…

FX Badge Changed Color

… this tells us that a fixed effect has been applied, and the clip itself also shows us the new speed (in this case [47.67%]).

Now, right-click on the slowed-down clip, and look for the Time Interpolation options:

Time Interpolation Options

There are 3 options, and the quality and render times goes from top (faster rendering & lower quality) ‘Frame Sampling,’ to bottom (slower rendering and higher quality) ‘Optical Flow’. In other words, try each one and see which works best for you, and try to keep as high up the list as you can to save render times later.

If you choose Optical Flow, you may get a red line at the top of your timeline:

Red Line

This means that Premiere Pro needs to render this effect before you can see the final full quality result. To do this, hit ‘Enter’ on your keyboard and wait. When it is done, the red line will have turned green, and Premiere Pro will play the timeline from the start: